Directed and written by Greg Robbins, this is the kind of movie that makes me go nuts, nearly jumping around the room while my wife wonders why she married me. She was watching part of it and said, “None of the words match people’s mouths, and why are there Spanish subtitles?” That’s because I’ll watch a movie however I can get it, like Russian OK.ru movies with long ads and screamed foreign translations, or even trying to find old gialli on adult sites and being freaked out by the sexual gymnastics on display before I get to what I really want, black gloved hands killing pretty folks. 

But I digress.

Shot in Pittsburgh and Carnegie, PA — you have no idea how proud this makes me — this is the story of Sheri (Christina DeMarco), who, as the title will tell you — don’t worry, they say it out loud and even have the name appear in the ending — just wants to dance. However, she soon learns that she has leukemia. As if life wasn’t bad enough, her mother died when she was just a baby. Yes, Sheri was in the car when a demon hit her mother with an 18-wheeler in a scene that is a little Duel, a bit Maximum Overdrive and lots of Final Destination 2. Raised by her father, Vince (Robbins, vanity is one of the seven deadly sins, but vanity projects are my favorite), she was just trying to navigate the high school years of boys, friends, and shopping.

But then, she gets powers.

Yes, Sheri is somehow incredibly healthy, still able to dance, despite being in Stage 3. She also gets the power of thought projection, so when she touches people, she heals their trauma by showing them Christ being nailed to the cross. 

Working with Pastor Tony (Scott Kerschbaumer), her powers are able to stop crime by 89%, halt Hollywood from making anti-Christian movies (“In Variety, it says the next big three movies scheduled for release have been shelved by the studio executives! It reports that they say that they may harm family values, and they’re never gonna release them!”) and halves the production of pornography. She is also able to save some of her friends, including a few who wanted nothing to do with the church.

This also has Eddie Mekka, who was Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, in the cast, as well as Peter Kent (who was a Terminator in the arcade game for Terminator 2, as well as showing up in Dead Heat, Re-Animator and Nemesis as well as being Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal stunt double, stand-in and friend) as the devil and oh wow — “The Russian Nightmare” Nikita Koloff is a biker. 

Sheri can also change minds — this doesn’t feel Christian — and get her message on every network. Satan keeps stalking her and her dad, who is now dating her oncologist, which seems a bit unprofessional. 

And then — spoilers — at Christmas, when everyone in the world has accepted Jesus, she goes to get her gift and dies in the other room. In Heaven, she finally dances for her mother.

I don’t think that secular creators could make this movie. It’s just too oddly sure of its mission, a film in which a rape is stopped by touching someone in the heart, and then they find their way, as well as that scene where the one naysayer in church has a mental battle with Sheri. It did what faith movies should do. It made me wonder what I’m doing with my life, writing long things about film such as this — to be fair, there’s no other movie like this — instead of trying to save girls with cancer or preach the Good News. We all have our own purpose, and I guess that mine is trying to see as many movies as I can and share that joy.

You can watch this—with the out-of-sync audio and Spanish subtitles—on YouTube.

Eventually, otaku who are all into tokusatsu grow up and become perverts. This movie is for them, a Sapphic ode to sentai rangers and giant women called forth to battle kaiju and get goo all over their chests.

There’s a whole series of these Mighty Lady movies. In fact, this is not the first movie by director Ichiro Omomo that I have seen, as he also made Star Virgin. That means that when you read that paragraph above, know I am not knocking any of my fellow pervs. I get it, perhaps more than anyone.

There’s also a 1984 movie, All About Mighty Lady, in which she nails a stuffed Garfield doll to a wall.

Now I have to see it.

Thanks, Bleeding Skull!

Is this porn? Well, I found a copy on eBay, so the answer is no. It’s…I can see how some people could be into it, but it’s mostly how they did the effects. That said, there are a lot of makeout scenes and guys are kind of fascinated by that. Then again, ladies love Boys Love yaoi or Girls Love yuri manga, which is focused on same sex romance. It’s a big world filled with lots of flavors, so why limit yourself, even if you want to be stepped on by a fifty-foot-tall Japanese superhero?

Never change, Japan.

Never change, Japan.

Rina (AV actress Rina Fukada) grows big when exposed to electricity. When her father is kidnapped, she’s forced to become a kaiju woman and destroy the city. Not even tanks can stop her. But can a tentacle monster? Or a metallic lobster?

Look, I get it. These movies are weird. However, don’t you owe it to yourself, just once in your life, to see a gorgeous Japanese starlet get raw frogged by a giant amphibious kaiju?

What blows my brain out is the care that was given to the city set. We know this has been made for jerking off to, yet the city looks as good as a real kaiju movie. The monsters look better than several I’ve seen in real movies. What was the tentacle and lube budget? And ah, there’s that pixelation so that even though this is as perverted as it gets, you never see any real genitals.

The fact that this exists gives me hope.

Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Basterds — known in Italy as Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato or That Damned Armored Train — is a 1978 film that ran near constantly on cable throughout the late 70s and early 80s.  In case you’re wondering just how important this film was to Quentin Tarantino, check out his excitement as he speaks to Castellari in this clip from the extras from Severin’s out of print release.

Tarantino started writing his World War II film in 1998, but would struggle with the film, working on it and then shelving it again and again. That’s when he arrived at a story much like Castellari;s film — a group of soldiers escape from their executions and go on a suicide mission. While that idea changed slightly, it was what he needed to get the script written.

Tarantino had always wanted to work with Brad Pitt, so this felt like the right film, and the addition of Christoph Waltz — Tarantino felt that the role of Hans Landa was unplayable until then — made the movie for him. Tarantino saw the film as just as much a spaghetti western as a war film and almost called the movie Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.

The film starts with SS colonel Landa interrogating a French dairy farmer about the last Jewish family in town. The farmer is promised that his family will be spared if he gives up the family, so the soldiers shoot through the floor, killing all of the members of the Dreyfus family except for their daughter, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent).

We them meet Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) of the First Special Service Force, who is recruiting Jewish-American soldiers to his team. They go way further than the regular troops, scalping Germans when they kill them. Called The Basterds, we soon meet two of them — Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz, a rogue German soldier who has changed sides and already claimed the lives of thirteen Gestapo officers, and Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz (Eli Roth), a baseball bat carrying maniac. There’s also Smithson “The Little Man” Utivich (B.J. Novak) and Private Omar Ulmer (Omar Doom) amongst others.

Meanwhile, Hitler learns that the Basters have been atatcking his troops, carving swastikas into the heads of the survivors so they can never hide their shame. And teh surviving Shosanna is now operating a Paris cinama under the assumed name Emmanuelle Mimieux, plotting with her lover Marcel to murder the Nazi leadership who will attend the premiere of Nation’s Pride, a propaganda film all about Fredrick Zoller, who recently killed 250 Allied soldiers in one battle.

British Royal Marine Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the Basterds are planning their own attack. He and Stiglitz meet an undercover agent, the German film star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), but Hicox’s accent nearly destroys the entire mission, as a firefight breaks out between the Basterds and an entire bar full of Germans. They survive, but now Landa is on to them. At the premiere, he strangles Hammersmark and catches on to the Basterds who have snuck in.

That’s when Landa makes his gambit. He has Raine contact his superiors and cuts a deal: the mission can continue as long as he has immunity for his war crimes. Zoller attempts to seduce Shosanna before they shoot one another and die. As the film draws to a close, footage of Shosanna appears, telling the assembled audience — including Hitler and most of his high command — that a Jew is about to kill all of them. The screen erupts into flames as Ulmer and Donowitz — using the fake name Antonio Margheriti, obviously a reference to the director of Yor Hunter from the Future — break into the box containing Hitler and Goebbels, killing the before firing their guns into the audience as bombs kill everyone.

The film closes with Landa and his radio operator driving Raine and Utivich into Allied territory, where they surrender. Raine responds by shooting the radio operator and carving a swastika into Landa’s forehead, marking him for life so that he’s never able to truly escape.

This being a Tarantino film, it’s filled with cameos and references. Bo Svenson from the original Bastards shows up as an American Colonel in the Eli Roth directed film within a film. Mike Myers plays Ed Fenech, named for the queen of giallo Edwige Fenech. Samuel Jackson and Harvey Keitel’s voices are in the film as the narrator and an OSS commander. And Castellari himself shows up as a Nazi general.

How does this fit into the Tarantino Universe? Well, Lieutenant Aldo Raine is Floyd from True Romance‘s great-grandfather. And Donowitz would be the father of producer Lee Donowitz from that same film. This has great significance, as instead of Hitler killing himself in a bunker, American heroes killed him in a blaze of glory. Is it any coincidence that one of Lee’s movies was a war picture called Coming Home In a Body Bag?

For all the amazing roles that Quentin Tarantino has created for actors, this is the first of his films to win an Oscar for acting, as Christoph Waltz won Best Actor in a Supporting Role (he’s win another Oscar for Tarantino’s Django Unchained).

Arrow Video is giving this the release it deserves. It all comes inside a limited edition “Operation Kino” packaging with new art by Dare Creative, complete with a 60-page Films & Filmmakers collector’s book with writing by film critics Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Ryan; a double-sided fold-out poster; Replica Nation’s Pride Premiere programme booklet; a La Louisianne beermat; 3 postcard sized double-sided art cards; a strudel recipe card and a reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative.

As for the extras, you get audio commentary by film critic and author Tim Lucas; interviews with editor Fred Raskin, special make-up effects supervisor Greg Nicotero and actor Omar Doom; Making it Right, a new visual essay by film critic Walter Chaw, author of A Walter Hill Film; Film History on Fire, a new visual essay by film scholar Pamela Hutchinson, author of BFI Film Classics Pandora’s Box; Filmmaking in Occupied France, a new interview with film scholar Christine Leteux, author of Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control; extended and alternate scenes; Nation’s Pride and a making of feature; an archival interview with Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt and Elvis Mitchell; featurettes on the original film, Rod Taylor and a film poster gallery tour and trailers.

You can get the 4K UHD and blu ray release of this movie from MVD.

I saw Watchmen in the first row of a packed theater, my face feeling like it was shoved against the screen, as the sound was so loud that it felt like it had crawled inside my brain and was screaming inside my skull.

Watchmen probably should have never been made. The graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons is so far-reaching, filled with so many nuances and a necessary understanding of the history of American comic books that at times, it can feel obtuse. How do you make it into a two-hour blockbuster? Directors Terry Gilliam, David Hayter, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass all were going to make the movie but no one could agree on a budget.

Enter Zack Snyder, who had made another comic book movie, 300, and was able to get this made. Yet even when you watch the ultimate cut, which adds the Tales of the Black Freighter into the narrative as it was in the original graphic novel, making this 3 hours and 35 minutes long, it still feels like it’s missing something. That it’s all rather loud sound and fury and you wonder not “Who watches the Watchmen?” but “Why am I watching the Watchmen?”

Snyder misses a lot of the small moments of the comic. One of them is a drunken Comedian telling members of President for Life Richard Nixon’s staff that he had killed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein before they could write about Watergate and been the gunman who committed the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nixon’s orders. That said, in that scene, it’s left up to the reader to determine if the Comedian is either wasted, literally being a comedian and telling a dark joke that only he finds humorous or trying to look like he means something when confronted by the god that is Dr. Manhattan and his possible daughter, Silk Spectre II. In Snyder’s film, during the credits, we see the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) with a smoking gun standing on the grassy knoll as Dylan’s “The Time’s They Are A-Changin'” blares on the soundtrack, less needledrop than sledgehammer.

The film starts, like the comic, with the Comedian being attacked in his apartment and thrown to the street below. Again, as in the inspiration, the hero Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, one of the bright spots in this movie) begins to investigate the murder, which leads him to other heroes, such as the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), Silk Spectre II (Malin Åkerman), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Nit  Owl II (Patrick Wilson). Seeing as how this was 12 issues of a graphic novel as well as back-up features that expanded the universe — and revealed key secrets when explored — those are enough characters to get into without also going into the past, The Minutemen, who are Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), the aforementioned Comedian, Nite Owl (Stephen McHattie), Dollar Bill (Dan Payne), Mothman (Niall Matter), The Silhouette (Apollonia Vanova), Hooded Justice (Glenn Ennis) and Captain Metropolis (Darryl Scheelar).

Meanwhile, at the funeral for the Comedian, Edgar Jacobi (Matt Frewer, also great) is there. A former villain, he’s interrogated by Rorschach and reveals that The Comedian came to him one night, obsessed with an island he’d found and a list of people connected to Dr. Manhattan with Jacobi’s name on it. At the same time, that list is revealed on a talk show with the god that is Dr. Manhattan, who escapes Earth and reflects on his origin on Mars.

This allows Silk Spectre II — aka Laurie Jupiter — and Nite Owl II — Daniel Dreiberg — to connect. Laurie has been the government-kept lover of Manhattan but now with him gone, she’s expendable. They start to wear their masks again, ending up as lovers and breaking Nite Owl II’s former partner Rorschach from prison with a mission: to investigate Ozymandias. At the same time, Manhattan teleports Laurie to Mars, where she argues for mankind being worth saving. He’s swayed when he learns that the Comedian is her father, despite the fact that he sexually assaulted her mother, the original Silk Spectre, who remains in love with him all these years later.

When they confront the former superhero turned CEO Adrian Veidt, he reveals his plan: to stop war by making Dr. Manhattan the enemy of humanity, killing 15 million people by setting off the nuclear reactors that he and Manhattan have built together. This ruse will stop nuclear war, so everyone agrees, other than Rorschach, who says “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.” He’s blasted to atoms by Dr. Manhattan, who leaves for another galaxy, the heroes all complicit in a lie that will do more to save the world than wearing a mask and punching a bad guy.

Dave Gibbons became an adviser but cranky Alan Moore has refused to have his name attached to any film adaptations of his work, saying “There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.”

I’ll say something nice for this movie. Writer David Hayter came up with a cleaner ending that doesn’t rip off “The Architects of Fear” from The Outer Limits. That said, there’s no reason now for the Black Freighter or the pirate comics to be important, or the island, as everyone sent there was creating the squid monster that Veidt teleported to New York City in the comic and…see, this is too big to fit into a movie. The fact that Moore took this ending caused editor Len Wein to quit the comic, saying “I kept telling him, “Be more original, Alan, you’ve got the capability, do something different, not something that’s already been done!” And he didn’t seem to care enough to do that.”

So is the fact that this is commenting on the changes within the American comic book industry. DC had purchased the 1960s Charlton Comics characters. At the same time, Moore wanted to reimagine another older comic, as he had done with Miracleman. MLJ Comics’ — the publisher of Archie — Mighty Crusaders seemed like a good fit, so he wrote a murder mystery that started with the dead body of The Shield. He wanted to play with the concept of four color heroes, so it would have the shock and surprise value when you saw what the reality of these characters was.”

Moore learned of the Charlton purchase and sent a pitch, Who Killed the Peacemaker? to DC managing editor Dick Giordano. After the acquisition of Charlton’s Action Hero line, DC intended to use their upcoming Crisis on Infinite Earths series to introduce the Charlton heroes to their mainline universe. As Moore would say, “DC realized their expensive characters would end up either dead or dysfunctional.”

Giordano convinced him to make his own versions, so Nightshade became Silk Spectre, The Question would be Rorschach, Peacemaker now The Comedian, Blue Beetle became Nite Owl, Captain Atom transformed into Dr. Manhattan and Peter Cannon Thunderbolt was now Ozymandias. They have gone from the happy adventuring days of comics to the grim and gritty graphic novels and been changed by the experience, something that never comes through in Snyder’s film. Sure, it look cool, but a lot of it is slow motion masturbatory super hero music video, exactly the opposite of the work that it is based on.

Based on the “Public Enemies” in the Superman/Batman comic book series, written by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, this DC Animated Universe movie, directed by Sam Liu and written by Stan Berkowitz, does a great job of getting in almost everything from that story as well as looking like McGuinness’ art.

15 years before this happened all over again in our reality, Lex Luthor (Clancy Brown) is elected President thanks to a severe nationwide economic depression. While he tries to make it seem like he’s working for the greater good, he uses his power to go after Superman (Tim Daly) and Batman (Kevin Conroy).

Luthor doesn’t need them, as he has his own superteam of Captain Atom (Xander Berkeley), Katana, Black Lightning (LeVar Burton), Power Girl (Allison Mack), Starfire (Jennifer Hale) and Major Force (Ricardo Antonio Chavira). Unknown to those heroes, Luthor has put a bounty on the head of Superman and Batman, which several villains try to get, including Metallo (John C. McGinley), who is killed by someone else and the murder blamed on the heroes.

As a meteor comes to Earth, Luthor plans on letting it hit and remaking the world, as he’s been taking drugs so that he can be as strong as Superman. He’s also hired tons of bad guys — Solomon Grundy (Corey Burton), Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale), Giganta (Andrea Romano) and Captain Cold (Michael Gough) to stop the heroes.

There’s also a scene where the Toyman (Calvin Tran) builds a Superman/Batman robot to go into space and destroy the meteor that’s pretty cool.

This is followed by Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, based on the Superman/Batman comic storyline “The Supergirl from Krypton.” Loeb moves fast with his stories and things get silly at times, but they are entertaining.

You can watch this on Tubi.